Dr. Herbert Weigand is a painter and a professor of art at East Stroudsburg University in Pennsylvania. He used slate as a painter's canvas for his piece in the Slate as Muse exhibition. “I had bought a house that at one time had a slate roof,” says Weigand. “The previous owner had replaced the slate roof with an asphalt shingle roof and had left the old slates in the garage for me. Each of the roofing slates measured 12 x 24 inches so for my painting, I joined two pieces side-by-side by attaching them to a wooden backing with wood screws. I then primed the entire surface with gesso and began painting.” The story of the title, The Riddance of Evil, comes from Haitian folklore. “Haitians believe that if a person has a stomach ache, the cure is to put a turtle under a pot in the middle of a road,” explains Weigand. “If another person comes along and frees the turtle the pain, is transferred from the sufferer to the stranger. The subject appealed to me and I decided to use it in this painting.” “The thing that I like about slate is the texture. After priming the slate, I drew a geometric abstraction on the surface and painted it in with acrylic paint. I usually give the abstraction many layers of paint and change the design as I go along. I sandpapered each coat of paint to reveal the texture of the grain, sanding some areas more heavily than others to create a distressed look. I feel that the work is like a person whose past experiences are reflected in their faces. I want the earlier phase of the abstraction to still be slightly visible under the most recent one. Once the abstraction was finished to my satisfaction, I made a photo silkscreen of the objects in the composition, in this case the turtle and the pot, and printed them on the surface. After the ink dries, I put several layers of thin oil paint glaze on the surface to create depth of surface quality.” # # # # #